photo: ralph murre
Whitman’s
Voice
by
Susan M. Firer
He
does not sing the poem like Yeats
reciting
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; he
simply
continent speaks each word, & in between
each
bump on the wax cylinder recording
Thomas
Edison made of Whitman in 1890,
you
hear another Whitman.
You
hear Whitman
interviewing P.T. Barnum,
with Tom Thumb & the orangutan,
Mlle. Jane, in the background.
You
hear all the gaslight
drenched operas he attended
& even smell the peculiar
l9th century perfumes.
You
hear Whitman’s
body kicks & swim splash &
cold water scrubs
at Gray’s Swimming Bath at the
bottom
of Fulton Street, and
You
hear him
at the corner of Fulton &
Cranberry Streets
in the Rome brothers’ print shop
setting the type for the first
LEAVES OF GRASS.
You
hear all
the Nor’easters he sat outside through
under his tree in the healing
country
under his gray wool blanket
recovering from a stroke, and
You
can even hear the Civil War
hospital kisses he soft lip-pressed
on the often
never-shaved cheeks of the dying
soldiers he nursed.
You
hear him ask them: “Stamps?
Licorice?
Can I write a letter home for you?”
And
in his American-formed voice inflected with canaries,
locomotives, and turkeys,
you hear electricity & his wild
throat
muscles. Each syllable is a tableau:
Six
year old Walter in the arms of Lafayette,
young
teacher Walter playing baseball with his students,
Whitman
at Poe’s reburial in Baltimore
(the only literary figure to
attend),
Walter in Brooklyn purchasing his
first
silver watch, gold pencil, frock
coat,
& loud singing on top an omni-
bus in New York.
You
see Whitman in the Astor Library
blowy from the ferry, a copy of
CONSUELO
in his hands, a bit of George Sand’s
cigar smoke about his ears &
beard.
You see coffee & beefsteak eating
Walt &
l857 hard pressed for money Walt
watching his Talbot painting and his
few other belongings taken by
lawyers
&
carried out & through the streets –
all for a $200 debt.
You
see Walt visiting
with brown velvet-suited Oscar
Wilde, with Longfellow, with
Thoreau,
&, of course, with Emerson.
There’s
Walt swimming & loping at Coney Island
& writing: “The polka increases
in popularity,”
& even (I am not making this up) walking
& loving walking the streets of
Milwaukee!
You
see nude sun-bathed, mud-bathed lame Walt
at Timber Creek wrestling with
saplings
trying to strengthen his
stroke-weakened
arms & legs.
You
even see old white-bearded Whitman
napping in his wheelchair
in front of his Mickle Street Camden
window,
like a “great old Angora Tom,”
like a snowy owl.
And
in each syllable, you hear transformation.
You hear his dream
breath, his sighs
as
he studies the night
sky patterns, hieroglyphics,
phrenology, & lexicology.
You
hear him call through the centuries
to all his young apprentices: “Hen,
oh, why, Hen.”
And
if you are very still when listening,
you can hear him rubbing lilacs
in his beautiful, white beard, &
I swear,
you can hear him swallow a
strawberry.
Here,
on my CD made from Edison’s wax cylinders
is
sapling planting Walt,
America’s
great slang coloratura
word
hero, plainly speaking; venerable Walt
saying
his hymn of vowels & consonants.
And
really his voice is much like the Long Island
pond
and spring water he wrote about:
“The
water itself has a character of its own,”
said
Whitman, “It is deliciously sweet
--it
almost has a flavor.”
~
previously published in Milwaukee Does
Strange Things To People
